seek time

The average of the time it takes to move the read/write from its current location to a particular track on a disk. In 1998, Seagate introduced its line of Cheetah hard disks with 5ms seek time. Ten years later, it was down to an average of 3.9ms. See access time.

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(storage)

seek time - The time it takes for a disk drive to move its head(s) from one track to another. The seek time depends on the power of the servo, the mass of the heads, the number of tracks traversed and the time taken to position the heads over the target track accurately enough to start data transfer. See also: average seek time, minimum seek time, maximum seek time.